Stunning Iran (Part 2)

DAY 2:  Azadi Tower (Freedom Tower/Square) > Flight from Tehran to Shiraz > Nasir-ol Molk Mosque (Pink Mosque) > Qua’ran Gate > Eram Garden > Mausoleum of Hafez

Yeah! Breakfast in Iran! Just like in Turkey or Israel, breakfast is fully of fresh fruit, yogurt, honey, fresh bread etc. (mmmmm, fresh honeycombs!!!!)

After breakfast, we made our way to the symbol of freedom in Tehran – Azadi Tower. We took some photos in the square and then made our way back to the airport for a domestic flight to Shiraz.

Shiraz is one of the oldest cities of ancient Persia, and in the 13^th Century it became a centre for the arts. It is also known as the city of gardens and has many fruit trees so dried fruits and nuts from this area are very famous. Shiraz was once the capital of the Persian Empire during the Zand dynasty.

Our first stop in Shiraz was the Nasir-ol Molk Mosque, or the Pink Mosque. The reason for the name is because of all the pink colour used in the tiles at this mosque. Pink is also Shiraz’s city colour – you will notice that the houses here look more pink-ish in colour, whereas in Tehran the homes/buildings were more of an earthy-yellow colour.

above right: the colour of my mom's attire matched perfectly with this mosque

This mosque is not very big, but the artwork of the tiles and calligraphy are very beautiful, and they have a prayer room that has a wall of stain glass doors. When the sun shines on these stain glass, the interior of the prayer room becomes even more beautiful.

Even though this place is not overrun with tourists, it’s still hard to take a photo to really showcase how beautiful the room looks, you’ll just have to visit for yourself to see it in person.

Inside the mosque there was also a little gift shop and a little room where we found two girls painting tiles. They said they were restoring the tile work and that we could paint too. Or we could buy old tile pieces that had fallen off the wall of the building. The paint they use is all natural material that they have ground up. It’s interesting to see that they continue to use and preserve this technique and art. If I had time, I definitely would have helped them out.

Outside of the mosque, there is a shop where the shopkeeper came out to sell pomegranate juice, like the ones we saw in Turkey. This got so popular as almost everyone in our group got a glass. It was sweeter than the one I had in Turkey. His young son (below, left photo) also helped to carry baskets of pomegranate to him as he was running out of the fruit so quickly.

This shopkeeper also had some postcards that were more interesting than others I had seen. They were hand drawings printed on postcards. Most other places I visited had postcards that were just photos of a monument or location and there wasn’t much variety.

Next we made a quick stop at the Qua’ran Gate (above photo: my mom holding the just purchased postcard of the Qua'ran Gate, from the pomegranate juice shop). This gate is to the north of the city and it is said that there is a qua’ran in the room at the top of the gate, and all those who pass through this gate are blessed on their journey to/from Shiraz.

As Shiraz is the city of gardens, we visited Eram Garden. In it’s hey-day there were many different types of gardens here and the design is know as paradise garden. They even built a river area, where we saw lots of locals sitting, but there’s no water running in the “river” now and it looked kind of sad actually. We even had one person in the group complain that it was a waste of time to visit this place.

What we did find after taking a quick walk around the different gardens within, was a little courtyard where they had a café for food, drinks and ice cream. It was really enjoyable to sit in a quiet courtyard surrounded by trees and fruits with only a couple of tables filled. Can’t even find something like that in Canada!

To end the day, we went to the Mausoleum of Hafez. Shiraz being a centre for the literary arts, had a few famous poets, Hafez was one of them. This place has the tomb of Hafez and some beautiful gardens and buildings.

You would think that Iranians, and Muslims, in general are very conservative and there are many taboo subjects. But Hafez (who lived in the 14^th century) was a poet who wrote about love, wine and religious hypocrisy. His work is so highly regarded in Iran that almost every household has a book of Hafez’s poems and many use his words as proverbs – and many will use his words as a guide to life, by asking him a question and then opening his book of poems to a random page for the answer.

In this place, not only do you find beautiful gardens and calligraphy, you will also see many couples sitting together in silence or quiet conversation. From my Muslim friends, I know that showing any signs of love or physical contact is frowned upon or even forbidden. But in Iran, I find that many couples will find a secluded corner and spend time together. There’s also not so much obvious fear (unlike when we were in Israel at the Golden Mount Mosque, the security guards wouldn't even let married men and women stand together to take a photo), because they don’t jump apart when they see someone else walking in their direction. And I guess in the garden of Hafez’s Tomb, it’s the perfect setting to be surrounding by words about love and life and be with someone that you love.

 

DAY 3: Naqsh-e Rostam > Persepolis > Imamzadeh Ali ebn e Hamze > Vakil Bazaar

above photos: every morning we had a huge breakfast buffet,

a cup of fresh lemon and honeycomb drink, and fresh baked bread

below: the view from the top level of our hotel (the tallest building in the city),

where we had breakfast and dinner

First thing in the morning, we drove to the outskirts of Shiraz to visit Naqsh-e Rostam, a necropolis with ancient rock reliefs from 500-300 B.C.

I don’t remember all the history related to this but the name that stood out to me is King Darius as he was mentioned in the bible and Veggie Tale songs. The tombs here are of King Darius and three of his descendants, as well as inscriptions that tell of what he did and what his empire and society was like. The tombs were looted by Alexander the Great when he conquered the Achaemenid Empire.

After that we made our way to Persepolis. This name I have heard of because I once watched a French animated film named “Persepolis” about an Iranian girl. It was a good film and I think it was nominated for quite a few foreign film awards.

Anyways, so it was exciting to visit the country Iran and the ruins of Persepolis.

a wide "road" leading to Persepolis

The English word Persepolis is derived from Greek Persépolis, a compound of Pérsēs and polis, meaning "the Persian city" or "the city of the Persians". To the ancient Persians, the city was known as Pārsa, which is also the word for the region of Persia.

French archaeologists excavated Persepolis in the early 1930s, they believed that it was Cyrus the Great who chose the site of Persepolis, but that it was Darius the First who built the terrace and the palaces. Inscriptions on these buildings support the belief that they were constructed by Darius.

With Darius the First, the scepter passed to a new branch of the royal house. Persepolis probably became the capital of Persia proper during his reign. However, the city's location in a remote and mountainous region made it an inconvenient residence. The country's true capitals were Susa (we will visit this place in a few days), Babylon and Ecbatana.

When you enter the grounds of Persepolis, the first place you (and all the nobility and soldiers way back then) will see is the Gate of All Nations. This is not really a gate, but a hall where all the visitors stood waiting/lining up to get an audience with the king. It’s called the GATE OF ALL NATIONS (photo on right), because there were visitors from all over the Persian Empire/World of different nationality as they had conquered so much.

The function of Persepolis remains rather unclear. It was not one of the largest cities in Persia, let alone the rest of the empire, but appears to have been a grand ceremonial complex, that was only occupied seasonally. Most archaeologists think that it was especially used for celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year, held at the spring equinox, and still an important annual festivity in modern Iran. The Iranian nobility and the tributary parts of the empire came to present gifts to the king, as we can see in the stairway reliefs.

The ruins cover a lot of area and it takes a long time to walk around. There’s also no shade so it can be quite hot and brutal from the sun.

After lunch, we went to visit the shrine of Imamzadeh Ali ebn e Hamze. This, like many of the other stops was just another shrine, so I wasn’t expecting much. But it made all of us go “WOW” when we stepped into the shrine.

When we went in, all the females were asked to put on cloaks (chadors) that covered us from head to toe, our headscarves were not enough. Once we were all properly clothed, they opened the little wooden door and when you looked through, you saw a glittering room! It was much more awe-inspiring than the palaces and mosques we had seen elsewhere.

No matter where you looked there were mirror-tiles covering all the walls and the photos came out in an eerie green that reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

A staff came and explained to us about the importance of this shrine – there is actually a tomb in the middle of the room, the person is Emam Ali, a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Locals will come visit the shrine and they usually are very serious when they stand by the tomb and pray. There’s also a corner for people to read from the Qua’ran.

The staff explained that mirror-tiles are very common in Iranian mosques, and although they are also used in palaces as well the meaning is very different. In palaces the mirror-tile work you will find are larger pieces of mirrors so that the King can see himself reflected.

In mosques, the mirror-tiles are smaller pieces and you can never see yourself. The mirrors works as a source of light, so that it lights up the room like you can see the Light = God.

This shrine is smaller than another one in Shiraz, which is much bigger and has more mirrored rooms and more people. Here it is much more quiet, so I feel that it allows visitors (both locals and tourists) to really feel the peacefulness of being in a shrine.

Outside of the shrine, there’s courtyard that has beautiful tile-work and calligraphy. We also spent some time walking along the hallways and courtyard.

Afterwards we made our way to Valik Bazaar, on the way we passed by the citadel of the city (above photo). It looks really nice all lit up at night.

Valik Bazaar is a large bazaar that is similar to those we went to in Turkey. There are also lots of modern little shops and coffee shops along with the usual souvenir shops. This doesn’t seem like a bazaar just for tourists, they sold to locals too because there were lots of shops selling fabric! My mom was focused on only finding fabric as she’s been learning to sew her own clothes.

above: outside of the bazaar, there were lots of coffee shops and everyone was enjoying the evening

below: inside the bazaar

While we were shopping, we found that a lot of the fabric shop owners did not know English. Most of the time they would just use a calculator to let us know how much the fabric cost per meter. The only thing you have to remember when shopping in Iran is that they have 2 ways of pricing things – I don’t know why they do that but that’s what they do.

1 USD = 100,000 Iranian Rials, and rials is the official currency but they also use another “currency” called toman. Toman means unit of ten thousand (but no one in Iran was able to explain this to us, I had to Wikipedia it and now I understand, it also sounds similar to the Chinese unit for 10,000 “Man”).  So when we asked the price for a fabric they told me 45,000, but they didn’t mention Toman so I thought it was 45,000 Rials (= 45 cents), what a steal!!!! I told my mom to pick, and we didn’t even bother bargaining because the price was so good.

A young female university student was also at the shop we were shopping at and she spoke really good English, she helped us to talk to the shopkeeper and translated for us. She also left off the “Toman” and told me 45,000, so when I handed the shopkeeper 100,000 Rials he said it’s not enough.

It was quite confusing and frustrating for us because we thought they wanted to raise the price or cheat our money. But in the end they cleared it up and said it was 45,000 Tomans, which equals 450,000 Rials per meter!!!!

We thought that fabric would be relatively cheap here but it ended up costing about the same as in Canada. So after this incident, we always double check when anyone tells us the price – 45,000 Tomans? Or 45,000 Rials? And most of the time if anything is under 100,000, it’s in Tomans….